A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Earlier this month I was fortunate enough to join Paul Goodhead from bit-tech.com on a tour of our GIGABYTE motherboard factory out in Taipei County, and what an eye opening experience it was. Motherboards have come a long way in the last few decades, adding more and more features with improvements to durability and longevity, so much so that motherboard manufacturing now involves bleeding-edge technology and manufacturing processes. Nowhere is this more true than at our Nan-Ping factory just outside Taipei in Northern Taiwan where GIGABYTE’s top tier motherboards products are manufactured, thoroughly tested and then packaged ready to be shipped off to DIY PC retailers around the globe.

Paul’s written a great article which details every step of the process with lots of photos of the production line itself. If you’ve ever wondered just how a motherboard is created, check out the article for yourself. Here are some images to whet your appetite:

Did you know?

GIGABYTE is the only DIY PC motherboard manufacturer that still has a manufactures in Taiwan. This gives us the edge in a number of areas. For example it means that top-tier motherboards products that showcase new technologies and bleeding edge features can be thoroughly honed, tuned and debugged by a relatively small, yet highly capable team of experts that have been together for many years. Believe me when I say that is virtually impossible to replicate in China and is one of our core strengths as a company. Also, when labor shortages hit production lines in Mainland China, our Taiwan factory can help absorb up to 40% production. While on the factory tour I was also reminded that we make every effort to make sure that all boards are tested to the limit, using the most stringent quality control procedures that actually help reduce our RMA rates.

Tom's Hardware recently took a look at the nuts and bolts of AMD’s new Llano platform and came upon some interesting analysis. First off, they gave a shout out to GIGABYTE, noting that our GA-A75M-UD2H features Dual-link DVI and is the only board they had that provided DisplayPort connectivity as well.

Also, GIGABYTE’s board was singled out for its overclock ability:

I spent a couple of late nights chatting back and forth with the fine folks at ASRock and Gigabyte, who helped in near real-time with BIOS builds. Eventually, I was able to get Gigabyte’s A75M-UD2H dialed in at nearly 3.4 GHz (it’d run in excess of that, but crashed under load) using a 23.5x multiplier and 145 MHz reference clock reflected as 143.5 MHz. The APU only needed a .05 V bump to achieve those numbers, too…

Other boards simply wouldn’t overclock well at all, failing long before we were forced to fight a bus speed idiosyncrasy.

They also noted that memory really matters with this platform:

Despite marginal gains in application performance, the bottom line here is simple: if you want to get the best horsepower out of a Llano-based APU, that graphics engine needs to breathe. Memory able to support a high data rate at low latencies is absolutely imperative for the best possible frame rates in games.

Don’t sweat DDR3-1866 if it means CAS 8 or 9 timings. Aggressively-tuned DDR3-1600 looks to be the sweet spot.

Stay tuned to our blog for the next couple of weeks, as we will be doing some testing to show how memory and even overclocking on this entry platform can lead to some great performance and more than just playable DX11 gaming.

Performance wise the 990FXA-UD7 is again very impressive. It outperforms the fastest board we have seen so far from ASUS and features all of the latest technology such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s to utilise the potential of our components. Users may also find support for 3TB drives, enhanced USB charging and Bluetooth auto shutdown to be valuable features.

Of course these high specifications and features do come at a cost which makes this board more expensive than most 990FX alternatives. That said, at £189/$249 the 990FXA-UD7 is still considerably cheaper than alternative boards for the Intel X58 platform.

SummaryAn excellent motherboard which has great performance and some excellent features. Added to that it is the fastest AMD 990FX board we have tested so far.

The 990FXA-UD7 is in fact the most highly specced AMD motherboard that GIGABYTE has ever done, in fact the first in our UD7 class. Let’s not forget too that excitement levels should notch up a level in a month or so’s time when AMD highly anticipated AMD FX Bulldozer CPUs come to market. We can barely contain our excitement.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Modern motherboards can have up to 2 onboard USB 3.0 headers, but not every mobo ships with front USB 3.0 connector cables. What do you do if your case doesn’t support enough front panel USB 3.0 connectors?

I’m facing this problem at the moment with my newest PC build where my new case only has 1 onboard header for USB 3.0 (for 2 front USB 3.0 ports). This means that the other 2 front USB 3.0 ports are wasted! What’s more is that my PC sits snugly under my desk in my cubicle at work, so it is not practical for me to always get on my hands and knees to access the USB 3.0 ports in the back I/O panel, so I want to have the maximum number of convenient front panel USB ports.

Bitfenix just sent us two solutions to this problem in the form of the BFA-U3-KU3IU3-RP Internal USB 3.0 Adapter and the BFA-U3-K435-RP USB 3.0 Front Panel. They both just passed GIGABYTE motherboard compatibility testing and we have added them to our USB 3.0 microsite. Here they are (they are hyperlinked so just click on them to have a look at the Bitfenix product web page):

I especially like the front panel connector because it has 4 USB 3.0 ports with a decent distance between them so that you can use multiple bulky USB devices at the same time.

Today we’re officially announcing the launch of our new A series motherboard range, supporting the very latest AMD APUs which we think will offer DIY builders a solid mainstream platform with added graphics muscle. We’ve announced seven motherboard models all based on the AMD A75 chipset. The top SKU is the GA-A75-UD4H which is an ATX form factor board with integrated HDMI, DisplayPort, Dual Link DVI and D-Sub video outputs, two PCIe ports (x16 and x8) supporting CrossFireX and a slew of features including 8 USB 3.0 ports, an 8+2 phase power VRM on a 2oz PCB – all in all, it’s one hell of a board.

We’re predicting that these new AMD APUs will invigorate the mainstream and entry-level DIY segment, offering some pretty decent graphics and 3D gaming performance as well as solid HD video capabilities. The integrated GPU on these Llano chips is really quite impressive. Here’s a video we made showing the platform playing Crysis 2 – not something you’d usually do without employing a discrete graphics card. As you can also see in the video, we also managed to squeeze a substantial overclock from our AMD A8350 APU, hitting a score of over 6000 points in 3DMark Vantage (performance mode). I’m sure you’ll agree….pretty impressive!

As you may have noticed, all these new A75-based boards will be sold as part of our Super4 motherboard product range. This basically means that you’re getting high-end components from top to bottom; features like 2ox copper PCB, 50,000 hour solid capacitors, dual BIOS chips, On/Off charging, dedicated fusing for each USB port and 108db HD audio. I guess GIGABYTE Super4 is a simple way to describe a range of features that will make sure you’re getting a really solid, durable and reliable motherboard regardless of price point.

Digitimes is reporting that the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD bundle (Z68XP-UD3 MB + 20GB Intel SSD 311 Series) will also be available in Taiwan. Origionally, this bundle was only planned for early adopter markets such as the USA, Japan, Germany, Korea, and Australia, so it’s good to see this exclusive offer becoming available in other markets too.

The bundle is available from leading online retailers such as Newegg in the USA (US$239.99), and will continue while stocks last. GIGABYTE’s press announcement with all the details and specs is available here.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Our friends from VR-Zone.com managed to get some footage of the new A75M-UD2H motherboard running an overclocked AMD A8-3850 APU running Crysis 2 at 30-40 frames per second.

The APU was heavily overclocked and game settings were less than optimal, but nevertheless, Crisis 2 on IGP is unheard of!

Speaking of which, we just released our own little video featuring GIGABYTE’s A75 chipset MBs that debuts Stew, our new in house geek and PC gamer. He’s from Liverpool as I’m sure you’ll pick up if you check out this little production.

TweakTown.com have published an article and video where they have our forthcoming A75M-UD2H motherboard pushing AMD’s latest Llano APU to achieve an incredible P6281 points in 3DMark Vantage (performance mode). TweakTown is claiming this overclock as a world record for an integrated graphics processor, further ramping up the buzz of expectation regarding AMD’s eagerly anticipated Llano APU platform launch later this week. We’ve put a lot of work into making our new Llano-compatible AMD A series boards the ideal base for these new Accelerated Processor Units, or APUs, so of course we’re totally chuffed to see a record-breaking overclock on one of our boards at this early stage.

“You may have seen this type of configuration before, but not like how you are going to see in the video above. We managed to overclock the AMD CPU from its default clock speed of 2.9GHz all the way up to 3.6GHz (150 x 24) using an FSB of 150MHz. In turn this also overclocked the DX11 Radeon HD GPU within the AMD APU from a core clock speed of 600MHz to 900MHz. This is really impressive and we even saw Crysis 2 running at 720p at around 40 - 45 frames per second and from a system without a video card (strange to look at, actually), that is rather good.” – TweakTown

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Not only does the Z68 platform combine the advantages both the P67 and H67 platform together into one, GIGABYTE has also included some unique Z68 only features on our motherboards including Intel Smart Response (enabled by GIGABYTE’s EZ Smart Response and onboard mSATA slot options) Lucid Virtue Switchable Graphics and TouchBIOS that truly make it a step above P67 and H67.

Monday, June 20, 2011

To celebrate the launch of our new Super4 branded motherboard range, we’re offering the chance to win a top of the range GIGABYTE G1.Assassin board – the award-winning gaming motherboard of your dreams! It’s easy, all you have to do is pay a short visit to our ‘GIGABYTE Motherboard’ Facebook page, hit the like button, play the Super4 game fill in your details and hey presto – your name will go in the hat for the draw. What could be easier!

We just announcement over the weekend that new 3.1 revisions of our GA-M52LT-D3P, GA-M68MT-D3P and GA-M68MT-S2P motherboards now offer AMD AM3+ CPU support, meaning that there are now a whopping 25 GIGABYTE board options out there for our customers to choose from.

AMD’s Bulldozer CPUs are still a couple of months away, but that doesn’t mean that folks who are building a new AMD rig now should be denied the chance to upgrade to a high performance AMD FX CPU at some stage in the future. By integrating the AMD AM3+ Black Socket on all of these 25 models, DIY builders of any budget will sleep easy in their beds knowing that their PC is capable of upgrading to AMD’s new architecture at some point in the future.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Most PC enthusiasts will have heard of the new AMD Bulldozer CPUs coming out soon. Here is a blog entry about the APU-ready motherboards we are readying for the launch – modeled here by the lovely Annie who works in our RMA team here at GIGABYTE HQ.

When we first heard that AMD was calling their new HD graphics enabled CPU an APU, there were a number of different ideas for what it could possibly stand for: AMD Processing Unit, All-purpose Processing Unit, Autonomous Processing Unit, and more… However, it soon became apparent that APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit, but yet there still seemed to be a lot of questions about what makes it different to a CPU. Finally, on June 14th AMD officially announced their next generation A-Series APUs in a detailed press release with an accompanying youtube video:

Essentially, the APU combines a CPU + discrete GPU on a single die, allowing for never seen before DX11 integrated graphics (you can play games that you could normally only play with a reasonable VGA card). It supports AMD Dual Graphics when paired with an AMD Radeon VGA card, and you’ll also experience a performance boost during productivity applications where the GPU can take on some of the work traditionally done by the CPU in PCs with integrated graphics.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

MAC had a look at the X58A-OC board recently from Hardware Canucks in Canada. I recommend you have a read as you won’t find a more detailed review around. It was good to see they managed to get some excellent overclocking results with the board also.

Bigfoot has teamed up with IGN, GIGABYTE, Crytek, and EA to give you a chance to upgrade your nanosuit and your rig in one great package. Three G1-Killer motherboards are up for grabs, complete with the embedded Killer E2100 technology, along with a copy of Crysis 2 for each winner. Just to make things that much sweeter, IGN is giving away 30 days of IGN Prime for free to everyone who enters into the contest.

To enter, you need only head over to the sign up page. From there, you can then enter your name and e-mail. Click enter to win, and you'll be set. From there, you'll also be able to sign up for your free 30 days of IGN prime, which comes with some nice perks.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

TeamAU, extreme OC team, is coming to Sydney to help PC PowerPlay magazine teach its readers how to overclock with sub-zero cooling.

The magazine is taking registrations right now and will invite 15 lucky participants to come to the show and overclock CPUs and graphics cards with liquid nitrogen. GIGABYTE organised some sweet prizes. There will also be a livestream for those that can’t attend. There is also a big chance you’ll end up in this popular magazine in post-event coverage if you participate!

Monday, June 13, 2011

nacho_arroyo from Argentina is in class of his own benching with the X58A-OC. He just took the 1024M world record running an insane 6650MHz on all 12 cores. wPrime puts extreme pressure on motherboard PWM, this is where GIGABYTE’s OC-VRM shines. Read more about X58A-OC power delivery system here!

Friday, June 10, 2011

As well as motherboards featuring Intel’s Z68 and X58 platforms and AMD’s recently launched 900 Series chipsets, Computex 2011 also gave us an opportunity to preview our forthcoming AMD A-Series boards. With the official launch still a few weeks away, these A-Series / Llano-ready boards garnered plenty of attention from the media who are no doubt curious to see how well these boards will deliver AMD’s highly anticipated integrated graphics technologies.

Here’s our favorite A-Series board image, taken at the show last week.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

The GIGABYTE EZ Smart Utility has now gone live for those of you with GIGABYTE Z68 motherboards. This is a quick and easy way to install Intel Smart Response Technology without having to reinstall your OS. Check out the video link below to see it in action, or visit the GIGABTYE Utility Download page to get your copy HERE

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

FirstZoom.TV stopped by the GIGABYTE VIP rooms in Taipei 101 during Computex and got a one-on-one tour of the MB tech on display. The video below is an introduction to the motherboard wall with special mention of the new Z68 gaming MB and of course the monster X58-OC.

Elmor got a monster record recently with the GIGABYTE GTX580SOC running at 1550MHz (highest GPU frequency seen in 3DMARK11 ever) and just got passed by OBR reaching 1540Mhz with slightly higher vmem frequency which helped get across the line.

OBR used the GIGABYTE X58A-OC in contrast to other overclockers on Sandy Bridge. Extremely nice benching and they are only just starting as a new driver gives a large boost to this benchmark which both Elmor and OBR are yet to use.